Fans of the Stickman Skater [99¢/Lite] and Stickman BMX [99¢/Lite/HD] titles should definitely pay attention to Fun Mob Games' upcoming Pocket BMX. I’m actually a huge fan of the Stickman games, and I love how they’ve managed to cram all the complexity of pulling off tons of tricks and combos and distilled it down to a 2D platformer with simple touch screen controls. But, as much fun as those games are, they’re extremely mechanical and stiff. Your flip tricks and grinds are really just canned animations tied to different control stick directions, and it’s missing a certain layer of interaction that makes you feel more involved in the game.
I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do with EA's Madden 12 [$6.99 / HD]. I mean, a game like Madden we sort of need to review, but I've spent a considerable amount of time with the game and honestly couldn't even say what's different between Madden 11 and Madden 12 aside from adding one more to the numerical suffix, redesigning some menus, and updating the roster. So, I've just updated our Madden 11 review:
The Madden series hardly needs an introduction, as football player turned coach turned commentator John Madden has had his name on football games for the better part of 20 years now. On home consoles, it has become tradition for EA to release a new Madden game each year with updated rosters, a few new features, and other various tweaks. As of tonight, the second third yearly installment of the Madden series has arrived for the iPhone.
Last year Two years ago we took a close look at Madden NFL 10 and thought it was a really great football game for the iPhone. Madden '10 came loaded with all the licensed players, stadiums, logos, and everything else you'd expect of a Madden game along with game modes ranging from single exhibition games to full seasons. The two hip new features of Madden NFL 10 for the iPhone were hot routes allowing players to draw on the screen to control players, and "action control time" which switched the game to slow motion mode allowing for precise maneuvers with the virtual controls.
If you’re an avid sports gamer and an NFL football fan, then chances are pretty good that you know that today, August 30th, is the release of Madden NFL 12 on consoles. Also coinciding with those console releases are the iOS versions of Madden NFL 12 [$6.99/HD], which are now available in the App Store.
Following the formula of most sports titles, Madden NFL 12 appears to be just an incremental upgrade to the Madden released last year. The game description boast new features like expanded rosters (though, some players have noted in the iPad version thread in our forums that they’re not totally up to date, showing Donovan McNabb still on the Redskins rather than his new team the Vikings). Also, collisions are said to have been improved along with the graphics and an expanded playbook.
In case you're not aware (and we can't blame you) chain surfing is an "extreme" street-sport which involves balancing on a hanging chain-fence strung between two posts, for as long as possible, whilst possibly performing tricks.
Words can't do this strange activity justice, so check out the clip below, for a little introductory chain surfing demonstration:
Flick Soccer! [99¢] by Full Fat Games is a penalty-shooting soccer game. Games like this feel like mini-games. The type of thing you wouldn't necessarily play for hours, but might jump on for 10 minutes of casual game-play, while waiting for something. This game has nice graphics of the pitch, goal and stadium, complete with a cheering crowd and a goalie who does warm up exercises. And it opens with a surprisingly decent rock song complete with vocals.
To shoot at the goal, you simply swipe across the ball in the desired direction, with short swipes to keep the ball low, or longer swipes to aim high. You can curve the ball with a curved swipe, or do a second swipe while the ball is in-flight to add after-touch. These curved shots are useful for confusing the goal-keeper, swerving around defenders, trying to correct a bad shot or for targeting with more accuracy. And it definitely feels great to curve your shot perfectly between the goal keeper and defender for a perfect bulls-eye!
The Let’s Golf series is no stranger on TouchArcade. We enjoyed Gameloft’s initial outing on iOS, and fell in love with the eventual sequel. Gameloft looked to continue this tradition of being the premier iOS arcade-style golf experience with Let’s Golf 3 [Free] while dabbling with the freemium model for the first time in the series.
The good news is that, at times, Let’s Golf 3 does manage to successfully marry a freemium structure with classic Let’s Golf gameplay. In addition, Gameloft manages to expand on everything we loved about the previous two titles and provide a ton of content to work towards. The bad news is that the framerate is extremely erratic and can become so choppy that it actually interrupts the gameplay and causes miscues.
For those of you that have played Let’s Golf 2, Let’s Golf 3 should look rather familiar. Again, there are 108 holes to play through spanning six visually gorgeous regions, and a wide variety of clothing and props for your character to wear, most of which change your golf attributes in some form. In addition, the classic Let’s Golf gameplay remains intact, with very little change to the core game mechanics. If you enjoyed playing through the previous games in the series, you’ll most likely enjoy Let’s Golf 3, as it’s essentially more of what made the previous games great.
This past June at WWDC, we sat down with the folks from Illusion Labs to dish on all things Touchgrind [$4.99] related, and the team revealed to me that their original iOS mega hit would be coming to the Mac App Store this Summer. Illusion Labs showcased a proof-of-concept video in January of 2010 showing Touchgrind being played on a MacBook Pro using the multi-touch trackpad, which led to our speculation that the game would come to the Mac with the announcement of the Mac App Store last October.
It may have taken a while, but Touchgrind has indeed launched in the Mac App Store, and it’s currently completely free. The game controls well with the multi-touch trackpad, though it definitely feels different than the iOS touch screen and does take some getting used to. The view is nice and zoomed out, similar to the iPad version Touchgrind HD [$7.99], which makes it a whole lot easier to tell where you are going while cruising around the skatepark.
If you’re a trackpad-equipped Mac owner, there’s really no reason not to head on over to the Mac App Store and grab Touchgrind while it’s free.
LambdaMu Games brought us Infinight [$1.99 /Free] earlier this year, and as we noted then, it's one heck of an atmospheric game. We anticipated big things from them in the future, but Dice Soccer [Free] isn't quite what we were expecting. Still, dice and soccer - has there ever been a more perfect pairing? Peanut butter and jelly has nothing on this one.
I kid, but they do make a surprisingly good fit. When you're up against AI opponents, there's always an element of trying to beat their numbers with your numbers. Dice Soccer just lays that process bare, and puts you in control of everything but chance itself.
Each match you play in Dice Soccer is split up into individual interactions, like taking possession of the ball, progressing down the field, and eventually shooting at the goal. For each, your line of three players is reduced to a roll of three dice. If the total of your dice is higher than the opposing line's total, you move on to the next step. If they beat you, they'll take possession and try to press the advantage.
If this sounds far too luck-based, don't worry -- you're given much more control than you'd expect. Though the dice are six-sided, there aren't six set results. Each player has his or her own selection of possible results, and most have special abilities on top of that. Luck will always play a part, especially in one-on-ones against the goalie, but you can strategize both in team building and in applying your bonuses each round. Once you've unlocked a few players, you'll be able to work on stacking your deck for crazy combos. I wish for multiplayer, if only so I could imagine the other player's grief when I roll a 36 to his 4.
My other wish is for a slightly faster experience. Each match is made up of a number of turns, and turns are long. The rolls take just a little too long, the animations are just a little too slow. Everyone seems to be enjoying a mellow day out on the field, occasionally leaving me as a rather bored observer. It gets worse when you're evenly matched with your opponent -- instead of watching a lazy day of scoring, you're watching while the teams swap possession back and forth while they run down the clock. Not that that's unlike some soccer games I've seen, but I'd still prefer something a little more fast-paced.
If you've got the patience to stick it out, though, Dice Soccer will give you more content than you can handle. There are 75 matches to play, and more coming. There are three leagues of increasing difficulty and tournaments in each. There are also 50 Game Center achievements to earn, and each of those achievements unlocks something new for your team, usually one of the 80 available players. Those players all have their own individual looks, powers and backstories, too. You can even recruit the team streaker.
The crazy thing is that LambdaMu has laid all of this out for free. There are a few unlockables that need to be paid for, but nothing game-changing. Of course, the game gives you plenty of opportunities to sink in a lot of cash, but you only need to do so if you want to unlock players quickly or buy unique outfits. We keep hearing developers say that they've looked at the freemium market and want to retool it to make games they'd find fun, and this definitely feels like one of those games. It's fun to play, it's more than just a time sink, and you really don't need to pay to enjoy yourself.
If any combination of dice games, deck-building and soccer sound fun, you really need to give Dice Soccer a shot, and be sure to stop by our forums to read further impressions or leave some of your own.
One of the things I love about the App Store is that even after 3+ years it still has the power to surprise me with a game release that I never would have expected. Over the weekend, Namco Bandai finally released the first Tekken game for iOS. Unfortunately, it’s not an actual fighting game, but rather a mini-game called Tekken Bowl [Free].
Tekken Bowl was a bonus mode of sorts that was included with the PlayStation 2 release of Tekken Tag Tournament. Tekken Tag was the first game I bought for my PlayStation 2 after sleeping outside of Best Buy to secure a day one purchase of the console. It was a phenomenal fighting game 10 years ago and still holds up well today. Namco Bandai is currently in development of a sequel to the game coming to arcades later this year, and presumably to consoles after that.
It’s been quite a few years since I’ve picked up Tekken Tag Tournament, but I remember being quite fond of the Tekken Bowl mini-game. Alas, those were simpler times back then, and Tekken Bowl’s simplistic gameplay doesn’t do much for me in this day and age. It doesn’t help that the iOS version is really scaled back from the original, though it does contain some new elements unique to this version.
I've always tried to reserve my own usage of the word 'extreme' for cases that really warranted it. Perhaps that's just a side effect of growing up in the '80s, when everything that was anything was labeled 'extreme.' To that end, Full Fat's Flick Golf Extreme [$2.99] is indeed an 'extreme' update to the original Flick Golf [99¢], but only in its locales, the gameplay hasn't changed much.
For the most part, the mechanics from Flick Golf remain intact in Extreme. You flick the ball off the tee, then you swipe to get it into the hole. You can swipe as much as you want to alter the direction mid-air, but you'll only have the balls first three bounces to change course once it hits the ground. Your score is tallied by a series of different facets, but much like the first one, it's more about stylized shots than accuracy. You can get a lot of points for whacking a ball straight into the hole, but you'll get more by hitting it off-course and swiping like a crazy person to get it back on target.
It's a simple, enjoyable mechanic that didn't need much in the way of refreshing for this release. Both World Tour and Quickshot make a return here, with World Tour acting like a campaign mode of sorts and Quickshot tasking you to rack up as many points as possible in a short amount of time. If you snag a bull's-eye or a hole-in-one along the way, you'll get time added. In addition to those is a Five Ball mode, where you get five balls as opposed to the campaign's nine to get as many points as you can on each course, with a hole-in-one giving you an additional ball.
If you get three hole-in-one's in a row in any mode, your ball will light on fire á la NBA Jam, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what this actually changed, except perhaps as a score multiplier. Either way, it certainly adds to the extreme nature of the whole experience.
The 'extreme' comes more in the way of location than it does in flaming balls. In lieu of playing on standard golf courses, you'll be flicking balls off of helicopters, moving boats and from atop buildings across five different courses. Each course is unlocked by scoring a medal on the previous one and each has its own Game Center leaderboard attached to it. With the exception of the fifth and final course, you shouldn't have too much trouble unlocking each of the courses. The last one tasks you with getting gold medals on the other four courses, which is a bit more challenging.
There are also a whole slew of achievements for the Game Center lovers, but more importantly there is a full statistical breakdown of how you're playing. Perhaps it's just the statistics nerd in me, but I rather enjoy being able to play a game that keeps track of trivial facts like how long my ball has been in the air or my furthest drive. It adds a sense of progression on top of the unlocks and achievements that feels a bit more personal.
Flick Golf Extreme looks as good as its predecessor, which is to say, it looks pretty good for a 3D golf game built for iOS. The 'extreme' settings are rendered well and for the most part, you won't struggle too much to see what you're aiming at. That said, Extreme has the same problem as Flick Golf did in that it's a bit difficult to accurately judge distance and fall rate. It might have something to do with the lack of any real depth-of-field or shadows, but there are moments where you'll likely start pulling the ball back mid-air only to realize you've fallen short of the target completely.
As the title should suggest -- Flick Golf Extreme is not a serious golf game, it's a high score game with a golf wrapper. You don't play through a nine or eighteen hole course, you simply hit nine balls off of a variety of different tees. It's still as enjoyable as the first and considering the game already makes use of slightly weird physics and non-traditional gameplay, the 'extreme' version is a better representation of what Flick Golf is all about: a casual, leaderboard driven golf game.
It’s written in the United States’ constitution that every holiday must be honored with a sale or two on the App Store. No joke -- it’s a new law according to yet another wiki page that I just finished vandalizing. If you're interested, the law is sandwiched between the “freedom of press” thing and that other law about how all American babies should be named after me.
Anyway, it’s with great honor that I tell you about Gameloft’s massive $.99 Father’s Day sale, a sale meant to stir your loins and your wallet. I can’t pin down a rhyme or reason for what games are being offered at their discounted rates, but hey, they’re cheap and I think that’s all that matters at the end of the day.
Here’s the list. The first link you’ll see is connected to a write-up of ours about the game, while the second will take you straight to the App Store:
You know, maybe these are supposed to be games that father's dig? My dad refuses to play anything without the words "King's Quest" or "Hearts" in the title, but to each his own I suppose.
Last month, FuzzyCube Software released iQuarterback 2 [Free] for the iPad and we thought it was pretty fun in our review. Gameplay involved tossing footballs into targets that were either stationary or moved laterally across the field. Just touching where you wanted a pass to go would send the football flying there, and the real fun was in trying to lead your passes to compensate for the moving targets. Being able to correctly judge where to put the ball so it intercepts a particularly fast-moving target was a hugely satisfying experience.
You can now get this experience in a more diminutive package for your iPhone or iPod touch called iQuarterback 2 Pocket Edition [Free]. We checked out Pocket Edition at WWDC this year, and when I first saw it I thought for sure the smaller size would make the game more difficult to play. Then I got my hands on the game and found out that iQuarterback 2 actually plays wonderfully on the iPhone and iPod touch. Both versions of the game were recently updated with improved hit detection on the targets, and the accuracy really feels much tighter now, even on the smaller screen.
As with the iPad version of iQuarterback 2, the Pocket Edition is completely free to download and play. It’s ad-supported, and this is one aspect where the Pocket Edition comes up short compared to its bigger brother. Whereas on the iPad the ads run at the bottom of the screen and are almost completely unobtrusive, on the iPhone a full screen ad runs after the end of a round. It’s completely in your face and awkward to skip past, so if you like the game then I’d definitely recommend disabling the ads through the 99¢ in-app purchase.
Other than that though the two versions are pretty much identical, and both are a lot of fun. There’s a couple of different modes to compete in with Game Center leaderboards and achievements, and there’s also some cool unlockable outfits and items which can give you some unique abilities when playing, and are also quite humorous. Best of all is that iQuarterback 2 is free, and the new Pocket Edition plays great, so there’s really no reason not to download and check out either version of the game.
NaturalMotion Games'Icebreaker Hockey [99¢] is a bit difficult to describe. Not because it's a complicated game, it's not -- but it so resembles the studio's Backbreaker series of games it's a bit hard to really dig into the premise of it without noting its pedigree.
So, if you've played Backbreaker, you're going to know what to expect from Icebreaker, but if you've avoided the series because you're not a fan of football, you'll be in for a treat. Icebreaker takes the same, challenge oriented, tower-defense-in-reverse aspects of Backbreaker and puts it on the ice.
Baseball Superstars has been a favorite around these parts for years now, with entries to the franchise released each fall. So it's surprising to see Baseball Superstars II Pro [$0.99] released a little over half a year after the series' last major outing.
Each update to the series brings new features and improvements, and this one is no different. It's a huge upgrade from the earliest games in the series, but when compared to last year's model, it's a bit less impressive. Don't get me wrong—this one is better than Baseball Superstars 2011 [$0.99 / Free] across the board. But if you've spent some time in Gamevil's series already, you'll find a shinier, prettier game, but not one that's much different from what you've already seen.
It was just last week that Illusion Labs released Touchgrind BMX [$4.99], the bicycle-themed semi-sequel to their fabulous little skateboarding game Touchgrind [$4.99/HD]. We really loved Touchgrind BMXin our review, as it retained the essence of the first Touchgrind while also adding many new features and improvements. One thing we didn’t really like, though, was the rough edges on the visuals. The game looked quite nice overall, but some of the textures were a bit pixelated and edges were noticeably jagged.
Illusion Labs is taking a stab at rectifying this with a new update that adds Retina Display support. This is exciting news on the surface but comes with a huge caveat: in order to push the larger high resolution assets the frame rate in the game takes a huge nosedive. It’s far from unplayable, but if you’re used to the silky smooth performance the game currently has then you’ll find the frame rate pretty unacceptable.
You can click on the before (left) and after (right) in-game screens below to scrutinize the difference between standard versus Retina Display resolutions yourself:
While the difference is small, the Retina Display support does add some needed crispness and clarity to the game. Unfortunately, the trade-off is a poor frame rate, and that’s a sacrifice I’m not willing to make. Thankfully Illusion Labs had the foresight to allow the Retina support to be turned on or off in the game options in the Settings app. Hopefully performance can be improved over time, but until then I’ll just stick with the regular graphics. It does kind of suck though, seeing how good the game could look and having to go back to something less. Touchgrind BMX is still a beautiful game, and in this particular case it really is the gameplay that matters most anyway.
If the Retina Display graphics were mandatory, I’d probably advise avoiding this update to Touchgrind BMX. But since it’s merely optional, you might as well grab it. It does contain a fix for startup crashes that some users were experiencing too, and the higher resolution graphics haven’t appeared to increase the file size of the game.
The Madden series hardly needs an introduction, as football player turned coach turned commentator John Madden has had his name on football games for the better part of 20 years now. On home consoles, it has become tradition for EA to release a new Madden game each year with updated rosters, 
